You’re to stuck thinking like an analytic philosophy trying to come up with proofs against skepticism that you can’t come to grips with the basic terms of the argument: that - to quote the inspiration for most proponents of this view - “There are no facts, there are only interpretations.” A lot of thinkers take this premise and do a good job of working towards (if not achieving) the goal you’re trying to demonstrate, Deleuze in particular does a god job, but none of your arguments really take skepticism seriously.

Your argument presupposed that skepticism is false and there is an external, verifiable world.

1. The claim there’s one way in which things can be true (i.e. because they correspond to reality) does not entail that there is one way for one’s beliefs about the world to be justified, or for one’s beliefs to have the status of knowledge. For example, many of our mathematical and scientific beliefs may be true. Our mathematical beliefs are presumably justified by some kind of rational, a priori insight (unless you are a conventionalist or empiricist about math; then they are justified by facts about the mathematical language or by our senses). Our scientific beliefs are presumably justified by their contribution to the explanation of observations.

2. How moral beliefs are justified is a subject of controversy. Here are a few options:
(a) rationalism - moral facts are facts about practical reason. In other words, there are rational requirements that are the basis of what we customarily think of as moral requirements. One view of this type is David Gauthier’s. Gauthier says that if rationality requires (at least) that one try to satisfy one’s own interests, then it is also rational for human beings to agree to certain restrictions on their ability to directly pursue the satisfaction of their interests. A lot of Kantian views could also fall here. As for how moral beliefs get justified, the answer is the same way beliefs about rational requirements are justified. This is probably through intuitions, and then you can tell some story about why intuitions might be significant here. The overriding idea is that intuitions about what is rational to do are much less suspect than intuitions about what is moral.

(b) naturalism - moral facts are natural facts. For example, one might think that “X is good” expresses the same fact as “X is pleasurable”, and that “One ought to do A” expresses the same fact as “On reflection, one would be motivated to A”. These are facts about the natural world, so our beliefs about them are empirically justified. A more sophisticated view of this type is Peter Railton’s.

(c) No-priority view: this view says that moral facts are like facts about secondary qualities. Locke thought that there is a distinction between the primary qualities of things (the properties they have under the scientific description - like their mass, for example) and its secondary qualities (like its color - properties that emerge from an interaction of the first type of property with the mind). So we might think that something’s being good is a combination of it having certain primary qualities and it striking us in a certain way. If this view is right, you might actually be able to see the wrongness of actions, in a way… John McDowell and David Wiggins are defenders of this view.

(d) Intuitionistic realism - we know moral principles through a priori intuition, sort of like mathematical truths. This view is spooky.

3. None of this really rides on having a “frame of reference”. In other words, the idea is not that there are axiomatic moral principles that you are given by your culture and then use to deduce consequences.

4. To why? - yes, you can make arguments against people’s collateral beliefs. No, debaters probably shouldn’t have to defend every collateral belief in a round. What this means, I think, is that you shouldn’t be able to run more than one skeptical argument. This is just a consequence of the general theory thought that you shouldn’t be able to debate on multiple levels or in “multiple worlds”.

So I know that killing babies is wrong but I can’t establish its “truth” omnispatiotemporally. I don’t know what the source of this “universal” moral truth would be, and I was under the impression that skepticism seeks to disprove the possibility of establishing such truth. If there is a source of moral truth - what would it be? God?

So I hold that moral truths are “true” within particular moral frameworks, but that it is impossible - and unnecessary - to “prove” the validity of such a framework in the same way one would prove the validity of a scientific (empirical) statement. “Killing Jews because they are Jewish is wrong” is true for me, but not for Hitler, and that’s what is wrong with Hitler. I would not be able to prove to Hitler that killing Jews is wrong and I shouldn’t bother to try.

If all truth statements are of the same kind - indications of “the way the world is” - then what is the mechanism for establishing the validity of moral facts? I can measure empirical statements in one way or another (ie particular wavelengths of light are green) but I don’t see how moral facts (assuming you grant that they exist) are possible outside a frame of reference.

Which leads back to my speaker-point example. As debaters, we can agree that the statement “speaker points are important” is true - but only within our frame of reference. The fact that it is conditionally true doesn’t reduce the real impact that the statement has; based on the belief in that statement, some people win the TOC and some people don’t, for example.

It seems to me that the function of skeptical arguments - arguments that argue “there are no moral facts” - is only to exclude any kind of value-claim (generally, the affirmation of any LD resolution) from the realm of “omnispatiotemporal” truth.

BTW, I love that word and I’m going to make sure I work it into every conversation from now on.

I take the phrase “true from the skeptic’s point of view” to mean “the skeptic does not think it is true”. This doesn’t mean there is a different kind of truth operative here - it just means there is disagreement about the truth value of a sentence (i.e. whether it is true or false). Barring some more sophisticated theory, sentence truth consists in the sentence representing things the way they actually are. The skeptic and the realist about morals arent disagreeing about what the truth of moral judgments consists in - they’re disagreeing about whether a class of representations (moral thoughts and claims) have that status.

You then make the point that values have to be indexed to cultures. I think that “cultural values” are just whatever cultures take to be valuable. This doesn’t mean that it’s valuable just because they take it to be so; this gets the order of explanation backwards. When people take things to be valuable, it’s because they think the things have objective features worth valuing.

“The statement “killing babies is unjust” isn’t “True” in the same way the statement “the grass is green” is true, but once you accept some very reasonable foregoing beliefs – ie in the moral worth of individuals – then it becomes “true.” ”

This seems wrong. They’re true in just the same sense: the world is such that grass is green and killing babies is wrong. Our beliefs have no bearing on how the world actually is. Killing babies would be wrong even if no one believed individuals have moral worth or whatever. What you are talking about is justification, not truth. And it seems like justification even in the “grass is green” case is going to assume some collateral beliefs, e.g. my senses represent the world the way it actually is.

The basic moral is this: all truths are omnispatiotemporally true. The fact that we believe killing Jewish people because they’re Jewish is wrong and Nazis didn’t does not imply that this is true for us but wasn’t for them. Likewise, the fact that we believe in relativity theory and Aristotle didn’t doesn’t mean it was true for us but not for him. One group is right about the way the world is and the other is wrong. Presumably, we are in the right in both cases. The fact of disagreement, properly speaking, has absolutely no bearing on what’s true and what’s not.

My more general point about this thread was that it points to the degeneracy of the intellectual culture of national circuit LD. Jay attacked the particular consequence of this: that people appeal to intuitions willy-nilly without explaining why this kind of appeal is warranted. But there is a broader moral: national circuit LD programs do not commonly teach students one lick of philosophy. If you are going to argue about what’s right and wrong, presumably you should have some grip on why we might think things are right and wrong beyond “our culture tells us this”, whatever that means. Without such training, the notion that skeptical arguments can be answered may seem mysterious. This, I take it, is a large part of what motivated both the strategy taken in this round and most of the subsequent comments about it.

Dave says: My argument isn’t that there is no “truth” in the world, but that there are different “kinds” of truth – different ways we can know truth, and different meanings for the idea of “truth.” The statement “the grass is green” is an observation of fact. The grass was green before we knew about it, and if we had never known about it, the grass would still have been green. We can’t debate meaningfully about whether the grass is or isn’t green. My point is that neither debater ought have an obligation to establish that the resolution is reducible to such an observation.

Take for example the assertion “Killing babies is unjust.” This is true in important and meaningful ways, but it is not “True” from the moral skeptic’s point of view (just as the statement “the holocaust was unjust” is not “True.”) My argument is that we can legitimately debate within a context of cultural values – that’s why it’s called value debate. Skeptical arguments simply try to remove the debate to a moral vacuum because this makes it easier to negate. The statement “killing babies is unjust” isn’t “True” in the same way the statement “the grass is green” is true, but once you accept some very reasonable foregoing beliefs – ie in the moral worth of individuals – then it becomes “true.” The winner of an LD debate ought legitimately to be the person who can link the validity of their position to the most powerful value.

Take as another example the phrase “speaker points are important.” Again, this is certainly true given the perspective of a debate competitor in a debate round. Yet it’s not true in any absolute sense; speaker points lack a referent, they are pure inventions. What is good and bad, valuable and valueless, arises from shared cultural perspectives that can be more or less fundamental. Recognizing that these cultural views are not naturally occurring or universal doesn’t invalidate them.

Eric says: He continues:_“Skeptical arguments presume that one side of the debate has the obligation to present and defend this absolute conception of the Truth. My point is that is idiotic…they all boil down to essentially the same thing: “The aff has to prove the resolution True and nothing is True so I win.” Who runs that? Most of the skeptical arguments I see say “there are no moral facts” not “there are no facts”. This is presumably because moral anti-realism is a much more plausible position than global anti-realism.

Dave says: For the purposes of LD debate, these are the same, since the resolution is rarely a question of observable fact. I grant that “Resolved: the grass is green” would be affirmable given the legitimacy of skeptical perspectives, but LD resolutions tend, probably by design, to raise questions of values, ethics, and morals. If the aff burden is to reduce their position to observable fact – and all the neg has to do is point out that ethics aren’t observable facts – then the aff can’t win.

Eric says: “Also, if the aff has a burden to prove the res true, then the neg probably has a burden to prove the res false. If nothing is true, then it can’t be a truth that the resolution is false. That kind of position wouldn’t negate even under that paradigm.”

Dave sighs: That’s like #4 in our block. But it doesn’t stop people from running the argument.

However, I don’t really understand several posters who appear to be advocating that people running some variation of skeptical argument should be excused from having to defend their theories in response to the fairly predictable argument: “Theory x would permit/justify/not condemn action y; we judge y to be a horrible thing; therefore, there is some problem with theory x.” Of course people are going to make you twist and squirm as they confront you with vivid evidence of some atrocity when you claim or imply that the atrocity can’t be condemned/called unjust/called anything at all. Either respond or don’t make the argument, but really, to say is it unfair or a violation of the rules of the game (or not intellectually pure) for debaters to be confronted with the implications of theory? Concepts like moral intuitions or reflective equilibrium just somehow don’t belong in debate at all?

If I am misunderstanding the positions of people, I apologize in advance, but I don’t see how you can say 1) Skepticism is a legitimate position in debate and is not precluded by rules of the game, and 2) those same rules say people running skeptical arguments should not be confronted with implications of skepticism that might strike our intuitions as funny …

The fact that neg’s response was framed as “discourse” makes it a variation that some people might independently object to (they don’t want to hear arguments about debate judges being humans first, or see this type of argument as inviting judges not to challenge their own intuitions), but skeptics are always going to be confronted with fact patterns where we have strong intuitions and asked “so what about that?” Whether the skeptic prevails in the argument often turns on just how well that question is answered; and if the question is nonsensical, I think that it is up to skeptic to demonstrate that, not the adjudicator…